


Jokes Aside

by Phritzie



Series: Drinking Buddies [10]
Category: Runescape (Video Games)
Genre: Allusions to Desire for a Minor, Allusions to Suicide, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Kink Negotiation, Not Underage, POV First Person, Relationship Negotiation, Soul Bond, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-05-01 07:49:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14515728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phritzie/pseuds/Phritzie
Summary: In life there are so many beginnings.Felix slips further into the meld. Sliske deals with an intruder.





	Jokes Aside

**Author's Note:**

> Please know that at this point in the story line, Felix is 24 years old.

I liked to push my luck where she was concerned. Good thing I had a lot of the stuff.

For many years, my pride was a terrible animal feeding itself exclusively on a diet of lies. And if I _am_ being honest right now, none of those ever managed to last their intended duration. She saw through them all in the end.

But Felix came around anyway, as one does when they have something they want from you. Was that the true miracle? Or would it be more truthful to insist the greater gift was when I rejoiced for our alliance without reservation?

In any case, at this point I'm just a stagehand. Here is our production.

Because _you_  certainly didn't come to find out what the World Guardian's mortal enemy thought of _himself_.

Nobody ever asks that.

You came to find out if I _liked_ her.

Well, all jokes aside. I did.

 

* * *

 

_Fsshh, fsshh, fsshh, fsshh…_

She had a stiff-haired brush that seemed to be for the sole purpose of cleaning root vegetables. Under running water, and then the scratch. I watched her take up the task without emotion, face a clean slate, running the bristles across each hard and dirt-streaked bit of nourishment until it was inoffensive to her scrutinizing nose.

Felix let the round pieces of a purple tuber drum into a heavy bottomed pot one by one, staring at me from her place at the counter. “Which god made dirt, Sliske?”

“Bik, perhaps,” I responded neutrally, refusing to give her the peaceful routine she inhabited. My vigilance was unnerving her, and thus the conversation, but she’d asked for that. Not my passion. So, I would leave finding the appropriate subjects up to her.

More of an afterthought than a cornerstone, the room was filled with everything from cooking appliances, to art, to unused comforts. A little cushion propped up in the corner drew my attention on entry, somewhat of an odd man out from the rest. I wondered what it was for.

Retrieving something hot and crackling from under the stove, she uncovered it and prodded at the contents with a metal fork before setting it on the windowsill. It smelled of salt and were I less hardened to smokes, rheumy spice. The pot went to the sink to be filled with water. Her hands Felix cleansed periodically with a towel, sometimes in a way that appeared thoughtless to me, a habit.

“I know you’re having a wonderful time peeping my homemaking skills,” she muttered matter-of-factly, looking up at the ceiling as her arm twisted under the counter and a flame emerged on a burner. It hissed to life over the tight clink of a valve opening. On this fire she placed the pot. “But can we get to fucking work, or what?”

“I’ve been saying,” I shot back, spreading my legs a little wider from my place across the room. Her dining table would remain combative territory for a while, I was sure, but it was also the only bit of furnishing in her home that could really accommodate me.

I swung my knees lightly at the end of it, piercing her with a look when she turned. “Finish fussing around with that, and I _have_ so much _work_ to undertake with you.”

Felix ignored me. “Jas, your master, the contest. What do you need the World Guardian for?” She took a spoon to what had cooled in the window and plated it. Middle and forefinger cradling her fork, she leaned against the large doorway separating the kitchen and dining room, gesturing crudely at my legs with her plate-bearing hand. “Heroism, or stress relief?”

 _Both._ I unconsciously shuddered a little and she laughed, abrupt. “Gods, you’re terrible."

“Don’t be impolite, Felix,” I cautioned her, threading claws into the collar of my robe. It had dried rough and mussed-up on her floor, but she refused to allow me the freedom of roaming her house nude. “I’m a guest. No, I need you to do what I can’t. Enticing your competition into letting their guards down before they participate in my race.”

Sighing, she worked around what was left of her dinner with dis-ease. “I still don’t understand what that means, Sliske.”

We'd been going back and forth about this for a while, by then. My patience hadn't withered yet, but it was a near thing.

“I need you to either help me kill all of them,” I stated slowly, voice dropping into a drawl that over-enunciated each word, “or figure out a way to keep them well away from the Stone of Jas.”

Her fork scraped the plate at a certain angle and she looked, for a brief instant, like she would throw it. Instead, she pushed off the wall and walked herself back into the kitchen to fuss about more, abandoning her meal in the sink. Her hands braced the sides of that metal basin for a few seconds before taking up a clear jar of something yellow from a shelf above.

“I’m not a god slayer,” Felix repeated, possibly for the fifth time since we’d begun. She rolled up her sleeves. A coarsely textured mitt she spread liberally with the mixture and this tool she set to abusing her cutting board. “In fact, I just reinstalled a goddess about a week ago. Seren says she doesn’t have plans to leave,” her scrubbing stuttered oddly, and I committed myself to finding out why later, “but that doesn’t mean she won’t, when the time comes.”

Her mulish behavior was cute, but not helpful. “What was that you did not just before, then?” Shoulders rising, I fell back until I could rest on my elbows and let my ankles sway. “Killing Gielinor was some trifling task to _you_. But be not uninformed—he was _every_ moment a god.”

“Under the control of a crazy old lecher.”

I raised my eyes from the floor, surprised. “Come again?”

Felix moved a hand to about neck height before thinking better of it, breathing out her frustration. “Nothing. Never mind.”

At my absolutely unimpressed head tilt she made a strange _mmm!_ sound and turned the wooden tablet over to go about beating up that side too. “Fuck you, okay? We got drunk. Or I got drunk. I don’t know.”

Something between rabid curiosity and sickness filled me to bursting. “ _Did you sleep with him?_ ”

“ ** _No_** ,” was her resolute answer, and some of that feeling retreated. “I _did not_ sleep with Nomad.” Her posture shifted into something less belligerent in her self-defense, and I became aware that what was happening between us closely mirrored the ordainment of a confidant.

_I want you to trust me again._

“So, what _did_ you do with him?” Wheedling gently, I tried to assume the look of someone amused but caring, rocking forward to hop off her dining table. "I'd wager you at least spoke." 

Her gaze lighted on me, traveling downward as I rounded the corner to take up a casual place against the wall, and I looked at myself. Stiff purple and gold had fallen open, exposed from shoulder to waist.

I smiled and moved further into the room, propping a hand against a low table I'd seen her use to saw into bread earlier. "Did you have a lovely time, leading him on?"

She looked away. Turned the stove off and set her pot in the window to join her abandoned crucible.

“Seren. She despises you in all the ways that matter most,” Felix said quietly, pausing in her ministrations. Citrus burned the air, and I wondered when parodies of memory would cease to taunt me. “When last I was there, before… reforming her. I’ll admit it’s no popular topic for social mixers or discussions, but the elves made it pretty clear to me that they hate you too.”

I considered a painting of a densely forested glen dappled with sparkling ponds – Tirannwn, in its old glory, curiously positioned to be displayed beside the pastoral charm of East Ardougne – and I tried not to recall so well the warm divinity of legs not mine enveloping her waist.

“I’m aware.”

And I believed the comment would slide by very little, that she would understand.  _She knows_. But something tight loosened up inside when Felix jerked a hand sharply, slapping the air. “It’s not fair when you do that,” she grumbled, and I disagreed. “You have all of the context. I can only guess.”

“Darling.” I returned her deriding stare pleasantly. “All you need do is ask.”

“Fine.” She spoke too quickly. “I’ll do that.”

I raised the ridge of an eye. “Good.”

Moments passed as she decided in what way she’d most like to frame her interest. “So… how long?”

“How long what?” Felix’s nose crinkled, and she turned to continue rubbing lemon oil into her kitchenware.

“I know I’m not famed for my precision,” she muttered angrily. “How long did—we tryst?”

 _Hard to say_ , I wanted to lie. “Years.”

Her voice rose to be heard above the working of her roughly textured mitt on the knife-scarred wood. “Yeah, okay, but how many years, Sliske? Four, five?” She acquired a small scowl, tone poisonous. “Did I lose my fucking virginity to you, too?”

Much as I didn’t want it to be, the very idea was like a blow to the gut. Immediate need pooled somewhere too low to be purely affectionate.

Felix looked horrified.

I assumed my reaction must have reflected the sensation.

I took a careful breath over her judgmental silence and swept a hand across the table, gathering crumbs into my other palm. Sigh ragged, I tossed the minor spoilage into the courtyard. I closed the sliding door on the way back; she was laying her sharp-smelling cutting block against a rail in the windowsill, presumably to dry or absorb its treatment.

She seemed about ready to fight again when I returned, pointedly relaxed in posture. “No. I didn’t take your innocence,” I scolded.  _If only_. “You’d know, had you cared to recall that we’d yet to meet, then."

“Because I’m supposed to trust a letter.” Felix finished wiping her hands and splayed them over the small table, slowly taking a seat in the chair opposite me. Her fingers lifted gracefully from the surface before folding in front of her, padded points pressed together.

I managed to work out the then-relevant insignificance of months gone by, holding her wary gaze.

“Two years, just about.”

And I wished Felix wouldn’t do that. Freeze up as though I’d just explained in detail how her whole family was killed and then served them to her.

“From today,” she clarified quietly.

“From today,” I confirmed.

Oddly, her head dropped into the hands she’d arranged with such dignity before her and she groaned something so low I almost didn’t hear it. “That _sucks_.”

Laughter short and indulgent, I obeyed the desire growing inside of me and dwarfed the table to kiss the top of her forehead. I leaned back a hair when she pulled away, eyes flaring down and to the right.

“Would you stop—” Felix growled, uncrossing her legs and bumping the purpled underside of the counter’s extension with a knee. “You didn’t wait long.”

Blinking through a soft smile, I wondered. “From the Ritual? No… as I recall, the invigoration from being renewed proved as prompt as it was…” _A trial not to look too amused_. “Potent.”

“Sounds like it was a decent inroad for you to begin manipulating me,” she accused. Her fingers tangled and untangled in smooth rotations of tan olive, shoulders low. “I think you put your chips down in too many places. Sloppy work.”

“I had enough time on my hands. Speaking of.” Felix very deliberately continued to avoid my gaze. “Are you going to ask me to touch you,” I found myself asking, easing forward again, “or will I have to bargain you into that, too? I seem to recall a certain promise?”

That got her to look, and it was pained. Something a little broken flashed through her eyes.

I didn’t appreciate the idea that I’d worn her down already. Not for the challenge, but because I needed her to want this. Badly.

“No.”

I chuckled, and for all intents and purposes, it was a warning. “No?”

“No, you don’t need my invitation to touch me.”

Progress on the front of assimilating with her was impeded when a hip checked into the table’s edge. I could move no farther. Felix didn’t look any closer to rising, either, peering up through the hair that had spilled over her brow and shoulder.

 _I can touch you_ , I thought, flummoxed.

A whisper was all that could be managed. “Don’t I?”

“You really don’t,” she replied, dark and low beneath her breath. Tongue darting out to slick a crooked smile, she offered me an explanation. “And I’m not one for asking.”

 _That is such a pity._  “Maybe I need to hear it.”

To my deep satisfaction, Felix pushed out of her chair in a loud scrape and stood. Hands found her neck. When we kissed, an imitation of abiding trust came through the kinesis of it. Close enough to be convincing.

She spoke around rasping teeth, quiet. “Touch me.”

 _Yes_. I fumbled knuckles against her shoulder, dragging claws through the wisps at her nape. “Again.”

Her laugh was lost somewhere under the shadowy translocation, marred by disgust. “I’m not your entertainment,” she reproached, wincing. Felix listed, and I allowed her to move away, dizzied by sudden changes not too unlike a rosebush. She gave up her footing to crumple on her bed, folding to breathe between her knees. “Apparently, now I’m your ally.”

I liked her bedroom. She’d nailed curtains over the windows to block out that persistent orange glow, and the peppering of papers she habitually accumulated called to be read. Notes and leaflets were scattered everywhere, tacked to a tall wardrobe and clinging to the top of a mirror by way of some gummy sap. I hadn’t spent nearly enough time there.

Kneeling down to see better, I tapped her thigh. “The only way to get over that is to keep doing it, you know.”

Felix rocked upright with a sigh only to fall back, bouncing a few times. “Thanks again for ruining my staircase.”

I took the opportunity to join her, and she watched me curl up suspiciously, avoidant, as our ankles trailed between one another on the carpet. I folded a leg over her, an escapable pin.

Her voice crackled a bit from something I hoped was interest. “You’re still hungry."

I thought about it for a moment.

Often those that dined on the organic loved to make conspicuous nuisances of themselves. Gorging - high on earthly sensations – until they were contrite from the excess. Long past the satisfaction of their basic needs. Some simply because they couldn’t bear the thought of good consumables wasted.

Claws dug under the rough material of her sheets, and for the first time I wondered how much of her I would need to experience to become sick of it.

A hole six millennia deep answered me snidely.  _You won’t get there. Not before she’s long been dead and cold._

_How long until she tires, then?_

I chose my tone with care. “Perhaps.” Anticipation’s nervous buzz thrummed low in my chest, reaching for her. “Are you?”

I watched her deliberate.

Felix’s directorate mind. I knew it well enough. Knew when she was giving me something other than her primary inclination – those mulled over discards of true desire and instinct. She considered the question seriously when impulse would have done.

“If you keep looking at me like that,” Felix whispered. She slotted a knee through my thighs. “People are going to talk.”

“How do I look at you?” Eyes closed briefly against the feeling of her hand sliding over mine, pressing it harder against where I’d been testing the mettle of her side. “Is it so terrible?”

The frown that preceded her refusal was vindicating, marked by the crease in her lower lip, an ever-refining detail. “The unbridled creepiness you tend to exude doesn’t make its way through your lovelorn bullshit,” Felix murmured simply, “so no, I’m all good there.”

I teased at investigating in my memory which of us made the slight moan of surrender that heralded our embrace, and found that it must have been I.

Some time passed midnight she pushed until I rolled off of her. Skittering blunted fingers over the crest of her hip, I made a soft observation. “I may not have your spoken affection, but your body certainly loves me.”

Predictably, she twitched away at those words.

It was hard to imagine that I would have to wait longer.

That more time could be wasted dithering in the space between forgiveness and hatred for Felix to decide.  _Am I worth dispensing with the contrarian? Or can you state confidently, with all malice required, that you are not mine to have?_

Maybe she would never do either, and I would be in for another several years of chaffingly awkward attempts at courtship interspersed with mistakes. Until I ran myself ragged. Got the grim task over with.

Or asked her to do it for me.

“Yes, my body is plenty enamored,” Felix agreed tersely, and pulled one sheet high enough to create a thin barrier between her dripping sex and my insistent hands. “However—I am so, so tired. Business is closed for the night. Go make a monster or something; I’ll be up in six hours.”

_Right._

_Tomorrow, perhaps._

Despite her vulgar rejection she accepted a kiss, my tongue. Released a blood-warming groan in response to every stroking piece of our rapport. Something tactile to savor.

“Dream of me,” I bade.

The door shut without a sound. I looked around the hallway. My initial urge would have been to remain, to hunt around in the glorious trove of miscellanea littering the floor. I hadn’t been expecting the dismissal.

I could return shortly. Her breathing was evening out…

…and my mouth twisted as she shooed me through the distance.

“Can feel you, creep… standing around out there.”

Harmless, fatigued mumbles. I could still swing it.

But soon after, impatient. “Sliske. Please go.”

_Later._

A black breeze brought me back into the yard. I found a small structure, tucked away behind a courtly pair of evergreens guarding many rows of garden boxes. Painted eggshell cream, they appeared to be sown with ornamental vegetables.

The false dusk followed me into the shed only partially – it was pleasantly dark inside. I puzzled over its interior.

Though too low in the way of rooftops for my stature, there was a messy carpenter’s station supporting an interesting enough array of scrap, tools, and in-progress mechanisms to bend my attention. I brushed aside the inflexible linen shrouding what lay beneath, but only found that the area was sorely lacking in fun secrets.

Raw, unbleached wood had been stacked high in the corner. I selected one and worked a claw under the bark-stripped grain. Red oak timber mottled with attractive burls.

Expression growing a little manic at the farcical thought that she might unironically prefer to carve hardwoods, I set the length of it upright on the bench.

_A monster, she says._

I wondered at her meaning and got to work.

It was a few hours later that I overheard a commotion from the direction of the central ring of the courtyard, a stand including the pulsating purple gateway that led from her home's dimension to the more commonly inhabited one.

Humming irritably, I threw down the bit of wiring I'd been finagling into a shape resembling vertebrae and stepped out of the low enclosure.

 _Well!_ _How about that._

A bald head painted hazy gold by the everdusk stood out stiffly from a fulsome loop dyed nearly black by the same light. Nomad had opted to conceal the bulk of himself in some kind of shroud. His spear was curiously absent, and the mage had a faint glow about his figure, an aura I quickly understood to be hiding him. From what or who, I wasn't sure yet.

"I can't say I'm happy to see you," I called affably, crossing my arms and leaning back against the roughhewn arch comprising her shed's doorway. "And I suspect there's a cause for you having come in the dead of night. One I won't be so pleased to discover."

He tried to escape – maneuver himself back into the portal. Volatile as they had been behaving lately, the shadows still obeyed my will closely enough to bind him several feet above the ground, struggling.

That rabbit-in-a-hawk's-eye look evaporated as he truly took me in. "Sliske."

Sighing, I rotated the hand I'd raised to contract it into a fist. Nomad was brought to me, hovering over the grasses and foliage covering her lawn without so much as another peep in reply, likely because of the stocky tendril I'd made use of to compel that lengthy green scarf deep inside his mouth.

When he was near enough to smell the bitter vapors of desperation, my lip curled into a hard smile.

I greeted him more formally.

"How would you like to tell me all about why you're here?" Patting the place above my chest where my robe had yawned while tinkering, I tried not to sound too alike the hypocrites I'd so detested in the Empire. "I'll go first. I'm having a wonderful time trying to negotiate a pact that might _actually_ save the world. Having a go at a new hobby. Done a fair bit of ravishing, though I'm not at all finished." His eyes narrowed gently, the beginnings of irritation, and I hummed. "If any of that disagrees with you, feel free to chime in afterward."

Nomad remained silent. I laughed as I remembered the scarf. "Oh, so sorry. Here you go!"

His disgusted sputter forced it to pool about his shoulders, revealing the lower half of his face. That grim line no longer spilled oozing black or heavy portentions, though I did see the usual physical signs associated with consumption.

That is, the wasting disease. Not souldevouring. No, the tracks of that addiction made themselves known in other ways – his startling gaze, the thick veins crowning his brow and temples. I wondered when he had fallen prey to such a downfall of humanity as bacteria.

"I've come to speak with the World Guardian," Nomad stated thinly. "And as for your... activities, I couldn't care less."

 _Is that so?_ Gathering a supportive rush of darkness into something approximating a seat, I fashioned an impromptu chair amongst her garden boxes, ignoring his rough grumbling. I made a show around attaining maximal comfort and faced him expectantly.

"I'm afraid I need more from you than _that_ , darling." The mage tipped his head back, revealing the corded expanse of his throat as he exhaled. "Especially if you'd like to hold on to that precious life you were spared, and so _recently_ , as well." The threat was made in earnest, though I felt no need to further strangulate or unman him. Instead, I slowly turned my upraised fist to the side and opened it into a curled palm. He turned with it, imprisoned but again brought to eye level. 

"We spoke on the matter of my possession." He offered me a cursory once-over before continuing. "I was told that were information to arise I would know who to go to. I assumed she was speaking in the rhetorical, intending for me to come to her should I acquire new knowledge concerning that _thing_ she seeks. Not just drunkenly accumulating reasons for us to meet again."  _As you seem to suspect of me,_ was his unspoken accusation. 

I was far from appreciative that she'd chosen to omit that detail. But it occurred to me then how little that mattered, given how I'd gotten to him first.

"You know," I stated conversationally, and loosened his bindings. Nomad had to tilt on a knee, foot planting in an empty plot to twist through a graceless fall until the mage was once more returned to full height. He brushed aside a leaning sunflower with distaste. "I  _love_ learning."  

 

* * *

 

When I'd had my fill of his discoveries, I didn't so much chase Nomad off as politely suggest he depart.

He only gave me a strange look, disappearing through wavering violet without additional protests.

A mystery many thousands of years in development prickled along my mind. Reentering the house, I mentally undid the lumpy tangle of bedclothes hiding all but hair from view. My feet brushed the carpet and her breathing changed to that of someone stubbornly attempting to doze longer.

I was reasonably eager to collect upon whatever events were in store following six hours – her necessitated rest or what power it would bring her – and so I pulled free my body from the confines of underappreciated dress, crawled into bed, and set about bringing her around to consciousness.

Her knee I found under a twist of sheet, hot and firm. I pressed a kiss there before working my way up.

I got as far as her hip. Felix offered me a long, soft murmur of encouragement before snapping into awareness at my answering growl. Her hands fought off mine as she scrabbled backwards, a flail of covers and limbs. Deep with dreams I could only hope to have starred in, she rasped unkindly. " _What the fuck_ , don't ever do that again."

"Good morning, sweetheart," I entreated blandly, unaffected. Her left cheek was lined with a mark, pressure from sleeping on something surged. "Feeling uncooperative?"

Her breathing went a little funny, still fluttering here or there with unwarranted fear as she became more fully awake. Hands rubbed at her face. " _Do not_ call me that unless you're ready to put up, you asinine wisecrack—" Felix froze, stuttered through a correction. "I mean, shut up—"

 _Oh, you do like that endearment better, then_.

In all ways I preferred to pander to whatever she wanted most, however fanciful it appeared. Women with strength enough to thrill and cleverness to spare, women desperately in need of pleasure. Men with downcast faces and rugged charm, men willing to beg for every touch. And all that existed in-between. Always passionate. Never loving.

The results had proven well worth the expended effort. A common, baseline theme had emerged with successive triumphs, and it was that Felix wanted people to be ruthlessly forward with her, but she also wanted to be _taxed_.

She wanted a challenge.

I purred, every white little tooth on display. “Is that what you need, _sweetheart?”_

“ _No_ thank you.” She pushed away my face and it was jarring enough to invite an escape. As I flicked irritated eyes back open, she pulled a folded tunic from her wardrobe and left the cabinetry ajar. “I’d need a second… bath.”

Felix paused at the adjoining door to her washroom. From my view lounging at the headboard, her lavatory still needed a mop. And many absorbent linens.

Several of her most fragrant bathing oils had emptied themselves into the bathtub and splashed up the walls, a crime of passion. I was thankful that whatever smelled aggressively of wintermint hadn’t been sacrificed in our tussle – my nose might not have stood up to that.

“When we—when you’re throwing my back out of alignment,” she mused reluctantly, startling me.

Maybe the sharp inhale she earned was worth the minor indignity of admitting a desire, because Felix swallowed noisily and turned. “Or if you’re bruising my throat up, to soften the brutality of it, anyway—“

I pulled her back into bed.

“That _was_ you, wasn’t it?”

The only problem was in deciding which scenario to play out first.

“Because that was a lot of fun, and having to actually find that guy again would take forever, given the whole shore leave thing–“

Privately, the thought of brutalizing her thrilled _and_ unnerved me.

But I could hint at it, harmless, a sharp glint in my eyes and an irreverence in the way I pressed a thumb into the dent of her cheek to feel myself inside.

I whispered down to her, mouth wet with anticipation. “Look at that.”

 _I_ was. What a sight. Bowed and voiceless between my thighs, the length of them sprawled to allow her adequate room.

The need to excoriate all traces from other minds thoughts of her grew. No one else should have ever had that knowledge, Felix with her lips stretched dark and slick around them. I gently traced a corner, fixated.

She shouldn’t have moaned around anyone living the way she was then, heady with enjoyment for the task and breathing roughly through her nose—

I bit off a snarl of displeasure when she withdrew. “Guess I finally found the only way to shut you the fuck up,” she muttered damply, swiping hair back behind her ear. “But if you want me to do this.” Her fingers wrapped in a wave around where my defaulted sex joined at the hip. “You’ve got to talk or move.”

“Interesting requirement,” I pondered, voice tremulous. Her other hand traipsed downward and I hissed. “No need to be rude. What bland palaver would you prefer I turn to, then. Historical anecdotes? Cake recipes?”

Felix snorted and kissed one of the slats patterning me, an unbearable tickle. I refused to squirm, breathing already quite troubled. “How about what you’re going to do after I’m done with this,” she suggested, mouthing at the place where her fingers ended.

Inhaling thin sips of air, I mulled it over. The urge to just watch her carry on with that was strong, but I also terribly needed her to continue. “You’re going to come for me until you can’t,” I decided finally, “or I tire of waiting to have you."

That seemed to do the trick. She hummed and those unhurried pulls resumed, lashes a black sweep under crinkled brows. If I shifted into her throat she would groan around it, a buzz that sizzled along the nerves in my back, so I did what I could to remain still.

“Felix,” I warned, calculating my self-possession’s collapse. “I need more than that.”

Her hand fell away to one bunching thigh and squeezed. Felix sank a little further, false crow’s feet forming to repress autonomous reflexes on each downstroke.

“You can take more,” I heard myself insist raggedly. Needful grinding in my mind forced shaking hips upwards again. Her eyes glimmered and in the darkness, there was the heat of ire or arousal. She dug in with her nails and sped, but only enough to erode my patience. “Please, sweetheart—“

She pulled off, a sudden loss of sensation, voice fried into splinters. “I said,” Felix cautioned tightly, anchoring my lap with a stern push when I slid forward. “Bruising.”

“Beg your pardon?” Wind erratic, I chuckled and chased away a ladder of saliva with a claw. “I did hear you, before.”

“Don’t think you did.” Her chin flipped up, heedless. Free hand at her neck, she dragged it back and forth. “See anything even remotely bruised?”

No.

No, I didn’t.

I stood. Walked right over her, turning in time to catch her hair and rein it around my palm once, twice.

Felix took the opportunity of my gait’s range to claim the vacated seat at the edge of the bed.

I’d had nebulous views around her intent before, but with that, it became very clear.

I wasn’t certain I could abide her, right then.

“Hoping to make sense of my vast paraphilia collection, aren’t you?” I pulled and twisted until the length of black whorls was secure against her scalp. Firm, a leash, but nothing that might inspire pain. “You want to know how to get to me.”

“Got something to hide?” Felix muttered, lips inviting another crisis.

The bed creaked under the shift in weight as she leaned with my direction. “I’ll give you a glimpse.”

Inside, my eyes took a moment to refocus.

There was a tension in each tacit assent of her spine that I found myself unable to read properly. More complex than the planes of her forehead, unlined and accepting. Kicking in at odd times, when her breaths followed such a well-choreographed rhythm under her tongue—

Three fingers curled around my wrist, half-buried in hair.

Felix was making odd little whining noises through the mask in her face where it flushed florid and upturned. Cheekbones cut to dramatic points above the hard, dark jut of the cock sliding out of her mouth, and I strangled a base moan before it could reveal how invested I was in the beauty of that.

A laugh left instead, too deep to be ridiculing. “Satisfied?”

I’d become so easily distracted.

Abandoned dignity and managed to go bruising away, producing a sharp jump in her shoulders where she let the impact of thrusting hard into her pour off.

But her grip on the back of my thigh never wavered, pulling as often as I. She was keen on inciting her injury, apparently. Over the goading sound of plunging in and out of her throat I could hear that need-struck groan again.

It dragged deformed answers from me, airy and dry. “Felix,” I said, and it was hardly a name, shifting gravel, too far flung from normal imitation to be considered passing for human anymore. Still, I spoke. “Stop me.”

Her brief acknowledgement did not come with compliance. Felix cuffed my hip and hollowed out her cheeks.

The hungry thing I pretended not to be outgrew the confines of its seams.

Perhaps Felix could tolerate the rest.

“You sweet fool.” My other hand rose, to pet and stroke red lines into the skin behind her ear. There would be lasting effects, so I gave her a final out in clarity – “Bite me, if I harm, bite,” – before very literally dropping out of normal practices in speech or form.

The rein I used to direct, and she fought it. I assured her with the continued working of my hips; _not off, down. On your back_. Felix leaned to the side as I swung a knee up to brace against the bed, and it was hardly anything to bring forward the other.

As soon as my knuckles grazed the sheets, the weight of her arms slithered around to cradle my waist.

“Sweetheart,” I whispered, no longer intelligible to her. “This is yours.”

Her flighty aspirations were a sharp contrast to the nails digging in to encourage.

It was so much more than enough.

Close, tight. A hand convex on the bed and another framing her from jaw to skull.

Felix realized what was happening as I lost the ability to predict outcomes, wide gleams shining with benign tears falling into a flutter. _Lustful. Wants me, wants me to—_

Black everywhere. Not from me, mysteriously. Crossing over in a mist, layers of reality blurring together. Murky tendrils, or the most corporeal of them, stroked over and came between us. Some curled tenderly around her shuddering chest as I drove with fraught pants into each smothering hitch that managed to escape.

I spent myself to the sight of her pinching an eye shut from one, a shadowy phenom sweeping cold and loving over her brow.

Felix needed time to recover and breathe, after.

I couldn’t give it to her.

Knees knocked her feet apart as they sank into the giving bedspread and her arms fell away, wrists upturned. I pressed kisses to the place where a muscle twitched rapidly underneath her chin, overworked.

“Congratulations,” I gasped. That too suffered distortion, wet mouths a soft buffer between syllables. “Now you know.”

But the wild unraveling of artifice-maintaining habits long ago perfected was seaming back together, concealing the hungering thing. _Practice makes permanent, Sliske_. Even that unreality which played untamed around us was fading into something less intrusive, banked by my consideration.

Felix snickered into the kiss. She almost sounded less human than I, panting and barbed with breakages. I licked away the remains of myself from her chin, murmuring. “Have I sufficiently contused you?”

A marvelous consequence that I would in memory immortalize, vowels failed her. “Yes,” she agreed, coughing. “I think you have.”

“Beyond repair?” Felix shook her head, albeit carefully. “Still, you’d probably prefer I not do that again.”

The somber redirection of attention I was not expecting; it caused my hand to fall from her hair, brown eyes darting to where creeping darkness sought to touch. Her words were easier to watch form than try to decipher aurally. “It’s getting worse.”

Referencing the shadows, I shrugged. “Nothing unmanageable—“

Blinking at the stern hand grasping my bicep, I looked back at her to find that Felix was anxious. She concealed it by rubbing at her jaw. “We need to finish having that talk.”

I was growing more inclined to agree, but firstly, my disobedient favorites needed to have their behavior managed. Casting full application into my corralling, I forced the dark shapes rubbing and sliding around us back into their compartments.

Partially.

As they ebbed and pulsed back into the shadow realm, some managed to furl outward in a rippling bloom. They fluttered at the covered windows and seethed across the floor, intent on escaping. 

Frown matching, Felix breathed out slowly. "Sliske." Her hand slid up until it was cupping the first ridge under my skull, and she brought her forehead to mine, eyes bright with concern. "Get dressed."

 

* * *

 

We took up the airs of business without too much trouble. Given her advanced healing rate, it didn't take very long for Felix to achieve a working voice again, and I was content to continue discovering more secrets in subtlety while she was distracted. For a while.

"Please put that down."

I cleared my throat and demurely replaced the golden statuette on her desk. "So, particulars aside. We've encountered a snag."

"I'd say." She leaned over the head of a small, risen area in the floor preceding a tall stand. Her shift moved with her, a dark green. Before her, a large book she'd acquired gods knew where, purportedly for the purpose of transcribing over spoken teleportation capsules. "Good is bedding evil. Evil can't control it's own forces. What's the world come to?" Her pointer finger slowly traced a line. "Shit, I'm going to need runes for this..."

In an effort to balance the room that hadn't gone off quite right, Felix had installed for herself a fine navigational instrument. Built of iron and wood in perpetual motion, it spun through slow ellipses never intercepting, some over and under, some on a horizontal plane. Centered was a globe just a bit wider than I, heavy with ornamentations she'd clearly made herself to indicate among other things a few major cities and principalities. From my earlier prodding, she'd expressed an affinity for sea travel, citing that it was easier to plot out journeys when she was able to visualize their natural course. The model was imperfect, but I could see how it might assist her planning.

 _Good is bedding evil_ sounded like a fair enough title for a performance I'd have liked us to take part in. “I have my own ideas about what constitutes good and evil,” I explained, an obvious enough attempt at an audible caress. “And naturally, it is in all of my designs to infect you with them.” Still she remained stubborn in her pursuit of memorizing the lectern, eyes down. Rounding the side of the globe’s outer rings, I drifted near enough to touch. “But as of yesterday, consider me nothing less than entirely dedicated to a common interest.”

Felix snorted and turned a page. “Such as?”

“Maintaining a base level of survivability for this world, of course.” I spun a small feature on her astrolabe, contemplative. “ _Protecting_  Gielinor. What will we have left to gloat over, otherwise?”

The astronomical object responded poorly to being messed with, grinding and locking. As it stopped moving, different areas of the continent became more visible – notably, the Kharidian desert.

"No gloating for me. I care more about its people than its land or riches," she muttered angrily, raising a quill to make a note at the bottom of where the tome rested on a drafting bar.

There she went again, saying one thing and meaning another. "Which people?"

Felix spoke haltingly, eyes flashing to meet mine before sliding back down. "I... have a girlfriend." It was so strange how poor of a liar she was, I almost suspected she danced around deceit that way on purpose. "Someone you can't harm. That's non-negotiable, by the way, and you should be advised that my seemingly bottomless patience is actually very finite—"  
  
"Is it, darling?" I hummed through my nose on an exhale, ponderous, utterly untroubled by the threat. "And does this woman happen to  _know_ you lay claim to her?"  
  
The way she held her chin high was honest enough. "We made a promise to each other a long time ago."  
  
I chose not to challenge that. "Very well." In the end, it didn't matter all too much whether or not she wanted to entertain a romance with someone else, so long as they had no qualms with me. "You can have your lover. But be forewarned. Any attempt she makes to part us will be viewed as her decision alone... and, as a word of advice from someone for whom 'a long time ago' is most certainly far greater than your lifespans combined; you will never be able to act as mediator in conflicts between those you adore without being forced to choose a side."  
  
_I will force you to choose a side._  
  
Felix received the counterthreat without much more of a reaction than any other I'd ever made, mouth tight. "Fine. Deal."  
  
I continued on, body and soul alike aching to reunite. "Any other stipulations?"  
  
"Yeah," she confirmed wryly.  
  
I smiled, patient. "Well?"  
  
"You have to treat me like a person." The spellmanual she'd been reading lay long abandoned under her hand. "Don't ever forget that you came to me for help. Don't ever try to use me again. If you do, I walk." Fingernails twitched against the page, a quiet scrape. "If I start to feel like you're _thinking_ about using me, I walk."  
  
I made to respond but her successive inhale was short, an uneven rush of harried irritation. "Is that clear enough?"  
  
For me, temptation to break moments of great tension with humor was too powerful a force to overcome, and I hoped she would know it as I spoke. "Would it count if I established you as a champion? We've little good press, our territorial incursion within the Heart." I didn't bother to suppress a soft moan at the thought of her in my standard's colors – a longrunning fantasy I'd be reluctant to ever discard. "And it would be such a terribly good look for you."

Something like a nightmare, Felix's stare underwent a disturbing transformation.

Blankly unimpressed eyes fell smoldering.

A slight scowl became a spreading, sharp smirk.  
  
I similarly changed, except to the reverse effect, because there were only two explanations as to the cause for this particular instance of volatility:  
  
Either her natural lack of talent in deception had been superseded by some extraordinary fortitude long enough to conceal a ravenous, untapped well of interest in my attempts thus far to entice her back to bed, and what I had just said, which I was then having difficulty recalling, had exhausted her stamina...  
  
Or she was pretending to be roused by it as a precursor to ridiculing me.  
  
I placed a silent bet on the latter.  
  
"Sliske," Felix stated accusingly, leaning over the lectern. "Are you saying you'd make some posturing, wrathful thane of me, felling your enemies and posing for statues?"  
  
With all the surprised fawnishness I could summon, I made a mock attempt at confused persecution. "No, my dear, never. I do think you'd best be employed in the field, however."  
  
Her hotly beguiling act doubled in its absurdity as Felix slipped around the winged stand, flipping the tome of world-stretching conveyances closed behind her with a papery slap, like an afterthought.  
  
"Yes," I reiterated gently, tingling at the touch of her hands on my chest. She pushed until I was crowded into the side of the globe's stand. "Much more effective in free agency."  
  
Felix tugged until I bent, and it forced us closer together. Soon enough, I could feel her pressed to me from waist to shin.  
  
Her ridiculous smile had a secret to share.  
  
I wanted to know it.  
  
"I assumed something a little more demeaning," she whispered, working up until her fingers were furled in the opening at the top of my mussed robeshawl.  
  
"Oh, how terrible. Like what? That I might make you perform unsavory tasks, or put you to menial labors?" The thought was amusing, but not at all what I'd had in mind. Not even close. "Lose your reservations about consequence and morality. Linza earned her servitude. We too made a deal, to our shared benefit."  
  
Felix's come-hither gaze cooled into something harder and more genuine the longer I spoke, but she wasn't done playing at the seductress.

"You're disgusting," she stated flatly, and I restrained a loud cackle as she jerked on my lapels. "No, Sliske. I assumed this."  
  
I'd be lying if I told anyone my breath didn't catch.  
  
She pulled aside the collar of her shift with a finger, inflexible but loose. Her neck was lovely exposed and straining like that, chin tilted to the side.  
  
Before, when we'd been in conflict, I'd had only moments to trace for my memory the trembling curve of it, overseen by her unsettled visage and my most rebellious wight.  
  
But her features were in that moment slack if not anticipating, mouth open.  
  
Felix offered.  
  
I was loathe to refuse.  
  
Pressure from a tension forcing my shoulders down made me notice she had tugged again.

"Submission?" I drew a quick total of my own expression and realized I'd been leering. "You think I want you meek and wanton?"

I did.  
  
Wonderful as it was, the guessing game had come close to full circle. If she made no confirmation soon, I would have to assume the entire sidebar had been nothing more than a ploy to lampoon me.  
  
Her abdomen was a firm rub at my hip, distracting. I arched into her molestation.  
  
In retrospect, I should've gambled more often.  
  
Shoulders sank in a low sigh, and she bit her lip. "I thought," Felix corrected impatiently, broadening the loll, "that you'd want to make me please you."  
  
_Gods, yes_ and _no, you foolish wretch_ warred to spill out in tandem.  
  
I settled on a more coherent fusion of the two.  
  
"We've made clear already that I would never _make you_ please me," I reminded shortly, skin itching.  
  
She rescinded the assailable offering in her bared throat. I panted only once into the kiss, its own accomplishment.  
  
"Did we? I don't remember that. You should learn how to speak for yourself," Felix purred, and disengaged completely. Her torso pulled back, hands falling. I realized my own had come to grip her waist as she stepped away, tightening momentarily before being overruled by surprise.  
  
She took in whatever I had failed to conceal with obvious satisfaction, turned, and left me hard and breathless in her study.  
  
I'm still not certain whether Felix expected that I would comport myself to some dignified attempt at civility, or if the way I forced her to the floor in her training room was what she'd planned and prepared for all along.  
  
In any case, that was how I found a new way to madden her.  
  
I made one last attempt to impress upon her the notion that her continued and enthusiastic consent was my best undoing.  
  
She insisted firmly that in my thinking I was classically mistaken, and that given the direction, it was acceptable to make very violent love to her against the stone jabbing pillar regardless of whether I had obtained an explicit 'yes' or 'no' first—  
  
—so long as I did her the honor of respecting that permission to touch her skin did not give me the right to get under it.  
  
I took those words at face value.  
  
And admittedly, if my eyes rested for too long on the way she went rigid and shaking when I pinned her hands behind the immobile practice column, then we were just getting used to the method together.  
  
"I need this side of you to be real," Felix muttered against my chest, shivering.  
  
"Likewise," I whispered back. "Let's do our best to make it such."

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> 02/07/19:
> 
> Credit to the 'terrible animal' part of the opening lines goes to Anne Boyer's poetry - I think that citation was deleted when I originally added the note below. D: sorry about that! If anyone enjoyed that sentence and has not before read Boyer, I would really encourage people to give her work a chance.
> 
> 06/17/18:
> 
> Further clarification: 
> 
> I do not headcanon Sliske as being attracted to minors. I didn't mean to suggest that with the inclusion of a trigger tag - just to make sure you guys know where I'm at on all that. He was grody over the idea of being her first love. 
> 
> I also want to clearly state that I do not condone pedophilia.


End file.
